Factory

Access is the thing every young photographer believes they need and the thing that, on its own, guarantees nothing. Being in the room is not the same as making a picture worth keeping. Stephen Shore was seventeen when he started turning up at Andy Warhol's Factory in 1965, and for the next two years he was in the room, most days, camera in hand, while one of the loudest scenes of the century happened around him. What he did with that luck is the real subject here.

The silver-walled loft on East 47th Street was where Warhol made films, silkscreens, and a rotating cast of stars nobody had elected. The pictures catch the regulars in the middle of ordinary time: Edie Sedgwick mid-sentence, Lou Reed slouched and unbothered, Nico looking past the lens, the Velvet Underground loading in, Brillo boxes stacked like a stockroom that happened to be art. The camera is small and handheld, the film is black and white, the approach is a teenager's: get close, keep shooting, do not interrupt. Nobody is posing, because nobody yet suspects the room is historic.

The value is the proximity. These are not the calculated tableaux their maker would later become known for; they are quick, warm, unguarded, the record of someone trusted enough to be ignored. That trust is what a great deal of documentary work is quietly built on, and the collection is a good case study in it. The teenager is not directing anyone. He is learning the harder discipline of being present without changing the temperature of the room.

What surprises is how much of it is downtime. The myth of the Factory is all amphetamine glamour and doomed beauty, but the photographs are full of waiting: people reading, eating, sitting through the long dead hours any working studio generates. Between the famous faces there is a lot of nothing happening, and the nothing turns out to be the most valuable part. A camera pointed at the boredom is doing something braver than one pointed at the glamour. It is the texture the legend leaves out.

You can also watch an eye forming. A handful of frames already show the frontal clarity and the flat, democratic attention to objects that would define American Surfaces a few years on, where a color snapshot of a roadside breakfast carries the same weight as a portrait. Here the instinct is present but unrefined, tangled up in the excitement of the company. The compositions lurch, the focus wanders, and some frames survive on who is in them more than on how they are made.

Which is the honest caveat. Strip away the names and a fair share of these images would read as competent teenage snapshots, and a reader who comes for a masterclass in picture-making will leave hungry. What the book delivers instead is a document: a specific, un-repeatable vantage on a scene that has since been mythologized past recognition, made by someone who happened to be both gifted and there. The rarity is the access, not the artistry, and the two should not be confused.

It leaves an uncomfortable question hanging over every photographer who has ever talked their way into a room they had no business being in. When the access is the picture's whole reason for existing, how much of the credit belongs to the eye, and how much to the door that happened to open?